I don't much care for greeting-card feel-good holidays, but I'm especially inimical toward Father's' Day. (Where the hell does the apostrophe go, anyway?) Obviously this comes from my own ambivalence slash murderous rage that I feel toward my own father. However, because I know my Oprah/Jerry Springer/Montel/Maury/etc., I know that empirically celebrating fathers is total bullshit. Some are good--quite good, actually. Some are terrible--my own falls in this category.
I guess my problem is with the unavoidable empathy I'm supposed to feel. Unrepentantly, irrevocably, and indefatigably, I scoff at this nonsense. As many of you already know, my own father is a selfish prick whose chance at redemption waved goodbye a long time ago. As a result, I've calloused over emotionally somewhat, but this can be a good thing. I'm impervious to further emotional trauma. Really. And as an atheist (agnostics are craven wimps who still want to hang onto a shred of possible belief "just-in-case"), I have no qualms with cutting ties and leaving them severed.
Personal growth can be supplemented by nurturing, but in the end it's all about you. This is not as cynical as it may seem. Personal growth comes with personal accountability, so you can't go crazy by murdering others and such, no matter how much you would like it. That's what ethics is: not an ethos born of religion. Actually, religion motivates a good chunk of the violence and antipathy that exists today, and that has existed for thousands of years. But I digress...
So actual fathers (not dads, as Kurt Cobain would say) can enjoy the day and rejoice in the fact, if it is a fact, that their children are not in prison or, in the case of daughters, on a pole somewhere.
The rest can, as the British say, bugger off.
Thank you.
R
(I always wanted to sign my name with one initial. That might be pretentious, but I'm doing it here.)
